Be The Change You Wish To See

Letting Go

My heart is sinking. Every channel, every news report, it is the same thing. People are rising up in anger, frustration, sorrow, despair, desperately seeking justice and change. They want change, so many are so lost about how to get it. Justice. What is true justice for something like this? This isn’t the first time we have ever saw a situation like this.

I sit here watching all this unfold, seeing it over and over with every turn of the channel until I turned it off. It still stayed with me. The video of a man dying on the pavement with another mans knee planted in his neck for minutes that seemed to last a lifetime. My heart wept as I thought of this mans family seeing the same images I was seeing with my own eyes. I did not personally know this man, but he was a fellow human being and my heart was breaking. I can’t imagine being his family seeing this played over and over, the talk between people out there everywhere. There is no where to get away from it. The grief they must be experiencing, the anger they must feel. The list of questions they have must be pages long, I know mine are.

I sit quietly thinking ” what can I do?” What positive could possible be drawn from this? How do we move forward from something so horrific? The looting, the rioting, the violence, we are fighting violence with violence. For years I said to someone “Even if you are right in your thoughts, your actions just erased all you were trying to prove.” All the emotions people are experiencing right now, they are raw, intense, fresh and rightfully being felt. The struggle I have is will those feelings and acting on them, change anything? Not this way they won’t. Will anything productive come from this, or just more of the same?

I personally have gone through life and had emotions because of horrible events that happened in my life. I held hate, anger, frustration, defeat in my heart for a father, an ex- husband, people who hurt me intensely. I let their actions change who I was as a person. It changed me because I allowed those feelings I carried to control me. I walked around with bitterness in my heart, a chip on my shoulder. I justified it up, down, sideways and backwards. I let those emotions that came from those horrible and challenging events in my life control every one of my actions as well as my reactions.

Many years of my life were difficult and full of heartache and hopelessness. I let the anger and despair consume me. I continued over and over, exuding the same behaviors thinking I was going to get a different outcome… you know what Einstein says about that. “Insanity” Aren’t we doing the same thing as a world as a whole?

My point in sharing that is…… we as people are expressing our anger, frustration, and desperation for change in a unproductive manner. We are reacting without considering the consequences. Carrying around resentment and anger and all the other emotions that go with situations like the one happening right now is only going to widen the gap. It is only going to promote more violence and hate. It is only going to strengthen hate and darkness. Rioting, looting and carrying out acts of violence, where is the solution in that? Justice, there is no justice in those actions.

Is there a solution? Is there a way people, everyday regular people like you and me can help change the world? YES, there is. We can. We need to first as individuals become better then as a family, a town, a city, a state and a country and so on. If we just learned how to care about one another again on a daily basis as a common foundation and built on that, well then maybe we could gain some momentum forward. If we could just see that our actions matter. We need to carry ourselves in the manner we want to be seen. Our actions need to speak for us. If we could make the choice to stop seeing everything by races and just in the sense of human beings we might get somewhere.

Treating fellow human beings with genuine kindness, concern, caring, and most importantly with a given respect EVERY human being born into this world has a right to, is required. So many misunderstand what that statement means. We wait until something so bad, tragic and profound happens to show accountability or demand it. yet, What happened to daily accountability for the small things? How do you think things grow into such large issues? What if we built one another up and focused on positive attributes in people instead of going over individuals with a microscope to find negatives, faults and put others down and stop searching for things that can be misled into something else. What if we held one another accountable to be, just good people and learn that our word should mean something, that we should be genuine in all we do and say, that our actions should tell the story. People can always find a way to turn things around to appear a certain way or portray something that isn’t, what if we made sure our actions clearly portray what IS. What if our daily actions spoke to the kind of person we are and it was in a good, positive way. What if it could change our world? WHO wouldn’t want that. Who wouldn’t want our world to become united and work together to create peace and kindness and togetherness.

It is time for us to let go. Let go of hostility and hate. It is time to let go of bitterness and stop letting anger and frustration run our lives. It isn’t that we can’t have those emotions, it is about learning how to have them and move forward, how to use them in a productive and rewarding way that united us. With that my friends comes justice.

We can change the world. Each and every one of us can make a difference by just being a positive, inspiring, respectful, caring individual. Lead by living and being an example for others. Be The Change You Wish to See in The World- Gandhi